Made in Ethiopia is a documentary about factories, specifically Chinese factories. It deserves attention from anyone thinking seriously about US reindustrialization and from anyone trying to understand how China touches the world. I watched it this past May in San Francisco. Afterward, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Its story felt uncannily familiar: The grammar of modernization in Ethiopia echoed that of the China I grew up in. It pressed on the part of my writer’s brain that keeps circling words like “labor” and “reindustrialization” — the currents moving through the intellectual world I’m part of. The film follows Eastern Industrial Park, a garment manufacturing complex in rural Ethiopia built in the wake of the Belt and Road Initiative. The ambitions were considerable: expanding factory operations, promising the local government 30,000 new jobs, and carrying the weight of China's development narrative abroad. Director Xinyan Yu structures the story around three women: Motto, an ambitious Chinese factory manager navigating impossible quotas; Beti, an Ethiopian worker learning the rhythms of the factory floor; and Workinesh, a local farmer whose land vanished beneath industrial expansion. Through them, the documentary poses quiet, hard questions about what industrialization means, what progress costs, and how China — as a manufacturing power — shapes the experience of modernization in African nations. Xinyan is an Emmy-winning documentary director whose work has tracked how big geopolitical forces shape ordinary people’s lives. We’ve known each other for years. We both grew up in a China undergoing what Dan Wang describes as ubiquitous “physical dynamism” — an obsession with building, with progress, with creating some grand future. That shared backdrop gives us an involuntary sense of shared intimacy with Made in Ethiopia’s themes. The film, ostensibly about Ethiopian development, also holds our generation's quieter reflections on our own relationship to progress. Xinyan and I were also shaped by the feminist discourse that emerged in Chinese internet spaces starting around 2018. Our work has been part of that dialogue — my podcast, CyberPink, carries that feminist sensibility forward. The feminist perspective in Made in Ethiopia arrives not as an angle chosen but as a way of seeing we can't unlearn. At its heart, the film explores Ethiopian and Chinese women’s relationship with modernization itself — as something that reshapes their days, their bodies, their possibilities, their sense of what life might hold.
Exporting the Chinese model?
Afra: Most documentaries about China's development fall into one of two camps: Either they scrutinize China with a critical eye, treating it as an imminent threat, or they maintain such distance from their subjects that the whole thing becomes incomprehensible. But Made in Ethiopia has a unique perspective. Through these three women, I could see how this story touches my own life. I found it deeply resonant. This film deserves to be studied. Xinyan: Thank you. That really means a lot. What's interesting is when we screened in Ethiopia last May, the Chinese ambassador attended one of our showings, which tells you the film has had some impact. He talked about his previous posting as ambassador to Myanmar, describing identical problems there — industrial parks, civil war, dam controversies, all entangled with China. He said none of this was new to him. The labor and land issues discussed in the film weren't new either. What mattered most to him, he said, was the framework we chose to present the story. Afra: I recently participated in a writing fellowship about “progress.” The program emerged from Western reflections on stagnation in science and technology, bringing together Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, scholars, and people interested in frontier tech topics. Everyone was asking the same question: How does the West rethink progress in 2025, and how can it become aspirational again, rather than nostalgic or technocratic?
Today's China has become a mirror for Western progress. America wants to reindustrialize but has no road map. China offers a vision of what's possible, of what can actually be done. I watched your documentary in May, but it keeps circulating in my mind. I wanted to ask: Do you feel like China has uprooted its entire logic of progress and transplanted it into Ethiopia? There are so many shots in the film — factory women going to the city to join parades, living urban lives. The appearance of those streets, the asphalt roads, the architectural style, the trucks, the color of the streetlights — all this infrastructure could be entirely Chinese. It gave me a kind of phantom sensation, like I was watching the streets of a Chinese factory town in 2003. Do you get that sense of China's progress being copy-pasted into Ethiopia? Xinyan: Actually, what I really want to say is that China didn't invent the so-called Chinese model of progress. A hundred years ago, during the Industrial Revolution, London had the same problems. Oliver Twist depicts child labor and air pollution. The side effects or trade-offs of industrialization aren't Chinese inventions. Moreover, when China opened up, it was Korean and Taiwanese companies investing in China. The piece-rate wage system that Chinese factories initially adopted wasn't invented by the Chinese; it was brought by Taiwanese factories. When people talk about China's development model as a "Chinese model," they're really saying this model was particularly successful in China. But there's something else: Chinese people have an extraordinarily intense obsession with the future — whether it's technology, their attitude toward working for family, or their approach to family itself, everything is future-oriented. Ethiopians, by contrast, are deeply attached to the present and past. I think Motto, the Chinese factory manager in the film, shares this obsession with the future and upward mobility, this fixation on self-improvement. As a Chinese immigrant myself, I have it too — the moment my life, even just a weekend, begins to feel stagnant, I get anxious. I've thought for a long time about why Chinese and Ethiopians have these mutual stereotypes. Chinese people think Ethiopians are lazy, believe wages are heaven-sent, don't like overtime. Ethiopians think Chinese people have no family affection, can go five years without going home, love money, are incredibly hardworking, but no one cares about enjoying life. Both sides constantly judge each other. I kept wondering — these stereotypes must have a source. I think Ethiopians and Chinese have very different views on progress. Chinese people bought into a promise of “bitter now, sweet later” — work 30 years, then you can taste the sweetness. My parents' generation really believed in that vision. Of course, that vision involves trade-offs. Think about the slogans we heard growing up: "Develop first, govern later"; "let some people get rich first." The reverse of these phrases all contain rubber-band elasticity. I think this is an incredibly brutal development philosophy — there will always be people left behind. Chinese people already have this insecurity, where a large portion fear being left behind by the advancing pace of development. Afra: Right. Everyone seems to be in a race, but the only purpose of the race is not wanting to be the one left behind. What struck me was when a Chinese worker in the documentary saw Ethiopia's economic situation and said, "Backwardness invites attack; development is the absolute principle." When I heard that, I thought, “This is so Chinese, so sloganeering!” But if you dropped me in Ethiopia, I'd probably think the same way because this is the developmentalism philosophy that I was raised with. Xinyan: Exactly. I think what many Chinese call their strong work ethic doesn't come from loving their work. It comes from fear: fear of poverty, fear of backwardness. I can feel this fear in myself. The moment things stagnate, the moment there's any relaxation, I get this strange anxiety. I've been trying to analyze where this anxiety comes from. All my hobbies seem like they need to be some means of self-improvement to be valid. If it's a completely casual hobby, I feel like it has no meaning. I always want a hobby that elevates me. About Ethiopians being attached to the present and past: Ethiopian traditions themselves contain many harmful practices, like forced marriage and other restrictions on women. So when industrialization arrived, these rural women were eager to participate. Leslie Chang, who wrote about Chinese factory women during industrialization, recently published a new book about Egyptian factory women participating in industrialization. Egyptian Made (2024) mentions that industrialization brought some conveniences to Egyptian women, but many female workers bore tremendous pressure managing children and household life while continuing factory work. In Egypt, though industrialization liberated women, many ultimately returned to family life. In Ethiopia, I see similar patterns. Women go to work in factories but eventually return to the family. Even Beti in our film, her ultimate wish is to marry someone slightly wealthier than her. No matter what economic independence industrialization brings her now, she still wants to return to family. Afra: I feel like Chinese society's entire infrastructure, on mental and cultural levels, is more permissive or encouraging of women living alone in big cities. Women traveling alone at night isn't a problem. And I realized this isn't universal everywhere. It certainly wouldn't work in India, and even in places in Japan you'd feel some danger.
When factory logic doesn’t take root
Afra: Watching your documentary, I felt like factory logic couldn't truly take root there. What I mean by factory logic is that it implies a way of life. China has many factory towns, right? I remember in Peter Hessler's Country Driving, he'd drive and suddenly arrive at a town where the entire town makes bras. The next town, the entire town makes leather shoes. Now they've just been replaced by higher-end products, like drone components or premium charging cables. In these towns, the breathing, the bloodstream, the entire way of life revolves around manufacturing: Local governments build infrastructure to serve industrial workers. Entertainment, restaurants, all of life's facilities center around the workers. My sense is that Eastern Industrial Park in Ethiopia hasn't formed this kind of ecosystem around it. Do you feel that way? Xinyan: Definitely not, including Dukem and several larger towns around Hawassa. Hawassa is a tourist city with its own independent ecosystem. Dukem basically completely relies on the influx of workers. We thought it was miraculous at the time — within five years, so many factories arrived, not just Chinese but Korean, Turkish, Indian. But the local government was incredibly shortsighted. They constantly came to factories asking for money, soliciting donations. Each mayor who came had different demands. The current mayor wants factories to give them free cement because cement is scarce. The previous mayor wanted to build a city park, so he came around collecting money. In my documentary, there's a mayor who says, "Chinese people, we gave you billions. You only returned us pennies. You didn't build us markets, hospitals, or schools." Many people feel corporate social responsibility wasn't fulfilled. But Chinese entrepreneurs are very pragmatic. I asked them, "This thing was promised. Why wasn't it built?" They said, "You didn't even let us complete phase two. Why should we build you schools and hospitals?" They had prepared to build a school, but because the design was constantly disputed, they argued endlessly, and finally the school wasn't built. About that mayor, during one screening I chatted with a friend who said, "Don't you think it's strange, a mayor standing up saying, 'You give me a hospital. You give me a school'?" I said, "Isn't that what local government should do? Shouldn't the government collect taxes and then expand roads?" Dukem now has serious problems. There are many factories there, and everyone commutes through traffic jams every day because all the buses are stuck on the road. That road really only has two lanes: one coming, one going. It could totally be expanded. And they could do what Chinese industrial city Dongguan does: have factories build dormitories or have the government build affordable housing. Ethiopians don't like living collectively the way Chinese people find acceptable, but the government could build affordable housing, studio apartments. In China these are completely normal supporting facilities that local governments would provide. But Ethiopia doesn't have this. I think all local officials are incredibly shortsighted. One reason is regime changes are very unstable — someone new is always about to take office. We discussed Meles, two prime ministers before Abiy, the current prime minister, a figure like Deng Xiaoping, a Tigrayan who fought his way out of the jungle with millet and rifles and ruled with an iron fist. Under his rule, Ethiopia's anti-corruption efforts were very tough, and they also had double-digit growth, like China. He also sent Ethiopian officials to China to learn factory management. Now, Abiy is more pro-Western. Initially, he was very pro-American, won the Nobel Prize, wanted to hire young people and hire more women in his cabinet. He sounded better. But now many people complain he's made this so-called democratic government full of corruption and all kinds of nepotism. Ethiopia's investment bureau — when we were there, the director was a 27- or 28-year-old woman. No one respected her because she had no experience, and no one knew why she got such a high position. In Addis Ababa there's a large Friendship Park that Chinese people built for free. Now you must pay about five or six dollars to enter — that's probably half a month's wages for an Ethiopian. Absolutely not built for the people. I recently read a paper by a Dutch university professor specializing in Chinese economic development. He said Meles studied China to consolidate his own rule, using iron-fist governance to improve the economy. So now Abiy's government is completely chaotic. All factory owners can't get US dollars now. They use dollars to purchase raw materials and sell in birr. The Ethiopian birr exchange rate is extremely unstable. Maybe this month you earn 1,000 birr; next month 1,000 birr has the same value as 500 birr before. All factory owners are struggling now because the country's infrastructure hasn't reached a level that enables stable economic development.
Worker counterculture in China
Afra: I always feel like building factories is one thing, but whether factory logic can actually take root is another. That’s why I often think of the 2019 documentary We Were Smart —《杀马特，我爱你. It follows young migrant workers in Guangdong’s electronics factories in the 2000s and 2010s, and shows not only how they worked but how they lived. After long shifts, they went to skating rinks, internet cafés, cheap photo studios; they built entire online communities on QQ, and they created the flamboyant “shamate 杀马特” hairstyle and aesthetic as a form of self-expression. The film also makes clear how misunderstood they were: mocked as “low quality” while they were really trying to assert identity and dignity within harsh industrial conditions. I’m not saying the shamate world was some golden age. It was part of China’s growing pains, a subculture born from rural youth thrown into accelerated industrialization. But that’s exactly the point: If you want factory logic to take root, you need worker culture to take root too — people having their own aesthetics, leisure, and countercultural spaces. Without that, you only have factories, not an industrial society.
A poster for We Were Smart. The poster says: “Hairstyle is the only thing they can control.”
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